NewsScan Daily, 3 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")

NewsScan Daily, 3 February 2005 ("Above The Fold")
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"ABOVE THE FOLD"
       EarthLink, AOL Choose Different Business Plans
       That Music in the Air Has Become a Rent-Or-Buy Decision
       Privacy Breach at Acer Site
       Who Gets to Decide What Journalism Is?
       Your Lying Eyes in the Photoshop Age
       School Days: What Exactly Is Going On?

FEATURES
       Flash Card
       Honorary Subscriber: Ovid

EARTHLINK, AOL CHOOSE DIFFERENT BUSINESS PLANS
     EarthLink and AOL, the two largest providers of Internet dialup access,
are pursuing starkly different business strategies: No. 1 AOL -- which
abandoned its broadband strategy last year -- is counting on advertising to
keep its dialup service viable, whereas No. 2 EarthLink is busy buying
wholesale high-speed connectivity from network operators and reselling it
under the EarthLink name. EarthLink founder Sky Dayton says, "AOL is
abdicating access and really wants to compete with Yahoo. We think access is
what we do." Implying that AOL is in the advertising business rather than
the communications business, Dayton wants to use a new $440 million
EarthLink joint venture with South Korea cell phone operator SK Telecom to
offer "cool" media services. "In South Korea they are watching television on
their cell phones, they are doing video conferencing, they are finding their
friends with location-based services. If you ask people in Santa Monica how
they use their cell phones, they say 'I make calls' or 'I have pictures of
my dog.'" (Washington Post 2 Feb 2005)
<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A57740-2005Feb2.html>

THAT MUSIC IN THE AIR HAS BECOME A RENT-OR-BUY DECISION
     The business model made popular by Apple's iTunes Music Store and its
iPod portable player --  which allows music fans to buy songs by the track
-- is being severely tested not only by new subscription services that treat
music as a pay-as-you-listen proposition, but by Microsoft's new
copy-protection software that allows subscribers to move their rented tracks
from their PCs to portable music players. How does this work? By putting a
timer on the tracks loaded on the player, and automatically checking whether
a user's subscription is still current. Phil Leigh of Inside Digital Media
says, "This is potentially the first serious challenge that the iPod is
going to face. What these devices are going to be able to do is attack iPod
where it's weak." But of course renting and buying can live together in
peace: Jupiter Research's Michael Gartenberg says,  "There's going to have
to be some education in the marketplace. There's some stuff that consumers
watch over the air and on cable but don't actually own and some DVDs
consumers actually go out and buy. There's going to be some coexistence here
as well."
(AP/San Jose Mercury News 3 Feb 2005)
<http://www.siliconvalley.com/mld/siliconvalley/10804837.htm>

PRIVACY BREACH AT ACER SITE
     Acer's online customers suffered a major privacy breach after the
computer maker's Australian shopping website exposed their personal details
to other shoppers using the service. The online shopping portal
www.shopacer.com.au revealed purchase order information including names,
delivery addresses, e-mails and contact numbers of customers who had
recently placed orders at the site. Customer credit card numbers were not
disclosed. Customers who logged on to the site to check the status of their
equipment orders via a bookmark stored in their web browser were freely able
to access order details of other customers. (The Australian 2 Feb 2005)
<http://australianit.news.com.au/articles/0,7204,12124067%5E15306%5E%5Enbv%5E,00.html> Rec'd fr J Lamp Deakin U

WHO GETS TO DECIDE WHAT JOURNALISM IS?
     A California court will soon decide whether bloggers have the same
legal protections as journalists under "shield" laws that protect reporters
from revealing their sources. Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kurt
Opsahl, who represents two bloggers targeted by Apple for leaking
information about new company products, maintains that if the bloggers are
forced to give up their sources "the public will lose out on a vital outlet
for independent news, analysis, and commentary." An opposing view is offered
by University of Iowa law professor Randall Bezanson, who says that simply
expressing opinions to a tiny audience isn't journalism -- because if it
were "then I'm a journalist when I write a letter to my mother reporting on
what I'm doing. I don't think the free-press clause [of the U.S.
Constitution] was intended to extend its protections to letters to mothers
from sons." (USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2005-02-02-about-a-blog_x.htm>

YOUR LYING EYES IN THE PHOTOSHOP AGE
     Have the ethics of photojournalism been changed in some way by such
software as Adobe Photoshop, which allows easy manipulation of digital
photos? The National Press Photographers Association says it's wrong to
alter the content of a photograph "in any way that deceives the public," and
the director of photography at the Los Angeles Times director of photography
says, "If our readers can't count on honesty from us, I don't know what we
have left." Dartmouth computer science professor Hany Farid is working to
solve the problem of dishonest photographs by developing computer algorithms
that can detect when an image has been altered. But Farid says, "It's a bit
of an arms race. It's tamper and tamper protection, and we can already
predict who's going to win. We simply make it harder" for the average person
with the average amount of skill to get away with photographic deceptions.
(CSM/USA Today 2 Feb 2005)
<http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/ethics/2005-02-02-photos-and-the-truth_x.htm>

SCHOOL DAYS: WHAT EXACTLY IS GOING ON?
    It is increasing commonplace now for teachers and schools to use the
Internet to distribute grades, pending assignments, written comments, class
participation, and disciplinary actions -- and to allow parents to check on
both the academic progress and general activities of their children. One
parent says, "My sixth grader has not bothered to tell me he is failing math
for the first time in his life. I was just perusing [the school's Web site]
and he's got one, two, three, four, five zeros. I have immediately put a
call in to that teacher." The parent adds: "If everybody would use it and
use it more, we could be more involved in our children's education." Yet
Pearson Education, one of the vendors for systems to manage student
information, estimates that only a quarter of its 16,000 school districts
buy the optional parental-access package. Among the reasons schools are
reluctant to use it is that teachers just don't want to let parents quibble
with them about grades. Yet without such systems some parents won't even
know that there's anything to quibble over, because, in the words of another
parent, "Kids don't always bring the bad stuff home." (AP 2 Feb 2005)
<http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050202/D8803G1O0.html>

*****

FLASH CARD
     "Love is a kind of warfare." (Ovid)

HONORARY SUBSCRIBER: OVID
     Today's Honorary Subscriber is the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-16 AD), the
short name used for Publius Ovidius Naso, who first came to prominence as
the composer of risqué love poetry, but whose most important poetic legacy
was his long narrative poem "Metamorphoses," a literary masterpiece that
became a veritable a storehouse of classical stories for English writers
from Shakespeare's time to the present.
     Ovid was born a year after the assassination of Julius Caesar in the
town of Sulmo, some 90 miles east of Rome. When the civil strife subsided
and Caesar Augustus became Rome's uncontested ruler, Ovid's father sent him
Rome to be educated for a political career. Ovid's true ambition, however,
was to become a poet. By age 20 he had found an appreciative audience for
his undoubted talent among Rome's sophisticates, and at age 30, he was
Rome's most popular poet.
     Initially, he wrote under the influence of his poet-friend, Sextus
Propertius, who wrote compellingly on the torments of love. In his poem
"Amores" Ovid depicts a witty lover who evades love's torments by turning
love into a sport. Then in the "Heroides" he pursues another theme suggested
by Propertius: passionate letters written by famous heroines to men who have
abandoned them. Then in the "Art of Love" he writes professorially, and
impudently, on how men can seduce women; in reality, however, this poem
reveals the folly of making the art of love into a "science." This poem,
more than any other, contributed to Ovid's loss of favor with the Emperor
Augustus, who was seriously committed to improving the moral tone of Roman
society. 
     Besides the poet Propertius, Ovid also enjoyed the friendship of Horace
and other members of Rome's literary elite. Having found acceptance as a
talented poet, Ovid took on more ambitious projects, such as "The
Metamorphoses," a collection of mythological and legendary stories told in
chronological order from the creation of the universe (the first
metamorphosis, of chaos into order) to the death and deification of Julius
Caesar (the culminating metamorphosis of the chaos of the Civil Wars into
the order of the Augustan Peace).
     When Ovid was 50 years old, Augustus suddenly ordered him into exile at
Tomis (modern Costanza, in Romania), then a primitive, semi-barbaric town on
the Black Sea. The exact reason for his exile has never come to light --
both Ovid and the Emperor merely made a vague reference to an unspecified
indiscretion. Ovid's banishment was never lifted and for the remainder of
his life he consoled himself by writing poetry about exile. He apparently
died soon after, an unhappy man of 60 whose suffering exposed the
authoritarian nature of Augustus.


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Note: We donate all revenue from our book recommendations to adult literacy
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